Meant-To-Be Mother

chapter FOUR


‘SO ARE you sticking with this airline gig?’ Rick asked when they were alone in the kitchen after an early dinner that night. ‘Or have you come to Cairns to give Max the flick?’

Siena sat back at the kitchen bench nibbling on a fingernail and flicking through a pile of junk mail while the twins ran out the last of their energy, Tina put baby Rosie to bed and Rick put the leftovers into freezer bowls.

‘Of course I’m sticking with it,’ she said, her feet jiggling as they rested on a bar at the bottom of her stool. ‘Why wouldn’t I be?’

‘You always did get bored pretty quick.’ His thick dark eyebrows shifted skyward, willing her to argue as she distractedly flicked through the pages of some magazine. She slammed the magazine shut and sat on her hands.

‘I have a low attention span. It’s not just me; it’s the bane of my generation. You wouldn’t know about that being that you are so much older.’ She shot Rick a bratty smile and he scowled back.

‘When did you go so grey, Riccione?’ she asked, throwing his proper name in his face, her diabolical inner teenager taking over.

‘It appeared overnight the day after you ran away,’ Rick said, his terrorising older brother mechanism kicking in as though it hadn’t been dormant for seven years.

Deep breaths, she thought. Happy place …

‘I think you actually care about this job, sis.’

She knew by the look in his eye that Rick was thinking it was because some of his guidance when she was younger may have rubbed off. Rubbed the wrong way, more like.

‘Unbelievably, my wayward little sister cares for something other than the wind at her back.’

‘What, me? Care?’ she said, holding a hand to her heart. ‘Never!’ But care she did. She really didn’t want to have to tell Max no.

‘So now we’ve exhausted work, how are things on the boyfriend front?’ he asked. ‘In cousin Ash’s last email he mentioned you had a fellow in New York the last time you visited him on a layover. But the last I heard you were hot and heavy with some guy in Paris.’

She watched him closely to see if he was sending her a sideways barb that the two of them hadn’t communicated by phone or email for months. But his question seemed genuine. She bit down the thought that it was her own guilt for not keeping in touch that was niggling at her.

‘Not a fellow as such,’ she said. ‘Gage and I share an obsession for home-made gnocchi and he knows exactly where to find the best Italian in New York. And with Raoul in Paris it’s all about good coffee. I have discovered I have a knack for cultivating casual friendships made in heaven.’

Something crashed in the next room followed by a slowly increasing wail of a twin who had done something wrong. Rick threw a tea towel over his shoulder and went to find out what was going on. But at the doorway he stopped and turned.

‘There is one problem with having a guy in every port, Piccolo.’

Siena’s chin raised an inch. ‘What’s that?’ she asked, knowing she couldn’t stop him from telling her anyway.

‘There comes a time when there’s no safe place left to run but home.’

Rick pushed his way through the swing doors and Siena was left alone with nothing to do with her clenched fists but unclench them.

Siena’s mobile phone buzzed, giving her an outlet. She waited for a name to appear on her screen but it was an unfamiliar mobile number.

Rufus? Maximillian?

She answered the phone. ‘Hello?’

‘Siena?’

James. She hardly knew the guy but his name popped into her mind the second his deep, well-modulated voice said her name.

‘It’s James. James Dillon from this afternoon.’

No kidding, she thought, but all she said was, ‘Hello again.’

‘Um, you left your PDA at my place. I found it on the piano when it started beeping madly about fifteen minutes ago and I wasn’t sure how to get it to stop, so I pressed lots of buttons until it did.’

Beeping? Oh, right, it would be a reminder that her next week’s flight schedule would have appeared in her email inbox—

‘Then I figured it was beeping for a reason,’ he continued, ‘so you might want it back ASAP. The only way to find you was to go looking until I found Rick’s address and your mobile number … Anyway, I’m at the lights on the corner of Henderson Street right now and I’ll be there in about thirty seconds.’

Siena leapt from the kitchen stool. ‘Oh, right. Okay.’

The last thing she wanted at that moment was handsome James Dillon knocking at Rick’s front door. Especially right after his charming ‘guy in every port’ comment.

Especially since, after the tow-truck had dropped her and the smashed Ute at Rick’s Body Shop, she’d stayed there pondering the idea quite extensively that if James had the same lifestyle and fly-by-night personality as New York Gage, or even bold Raoul in Paris, he would have been serious casual friendship material.

Heck, the second she had laid eyes on him, half the cells in her body had rocketed to life. The connection she had felt to him had been electric. But, within the same second, once it had sunk in that he was Kane’s father, every other cell had already begun to resist everything he had to offer.

‘I’ll meet you out front,’ she offered, her mind turning with ways to get past Rick and out the front door. Boy, if the world wasn’t spinning to make her feel like a sixteen-year-old all over again! ‘Rick’s place is the one with the nauseating Triton fountain in the front yard.’

‘Thanks. See you soon.’ And then he hung up.

Siena pressed the phone off, listened carefully to see where Rick was, then just gave in and made a run for it down the hall and out the front door. The change of air from air-conditioned cool to hot and humid made her skin clammy in half a second.

She power-walked down the gravel driveway as a sleek, dark sedan pulled up by Rick’s letterbox. The tinted window rolled down and Siena jogged up to meet its inhabitant.

‘I’ve got your package,’ James said out of the corner of his mouth like some sort of Chicago gangster. Some breathtakingly handsome gangster made up of shadows and clean-cut lines who made her heart beat faster in her chest. Although that could have been the escape from Alcatraz that had her adrenalin in high gear.

He waved her PDA at her with one long-fingered hand. Long fingers with short fingernails. Tanned knuckles covered in a fine spray of ash-brown hair. Not smooth and manicured like the guys she usually made friends with.

James Dillon had a real man’s hands. And she really really liked them. And his inadvertently sexy two-day-old stubble. And his woodsy scent …

‘What’ll it cost me?’ Siena asked, crouching down and resting her palms on her knees.

He leaned out the window, resting his tanned forearm along the window frame until his face was lit by moonlight. ‘Thanks and a smile from a pretty lady are all this chump will ever need.’

Even though the air was so humid she could feel it slithering over every inch of bare skin, her throat went dry. He handed her the PDA. ‘Thanks,’ she said, and though she tried to smile she found that for this guy she couldn’t fake it.

‘No worries.’

‘So where’s Kane?’ she asked, wondering why she was prolonging this when she should have run inside the minute she had her goods.

‘Home with Matt. Helping make dinner. I’m almost too scared to go home to see what I’m in for.’

‘Right.’

She nodded. He half-smiled. And, though she knew she ought to give him a friendly salute and run back inside before Rick came looking for her, Siena could feel that same tenuous thread from earlier wrapping itself tighter about her. In darkness and moonlight with the still of night about them it felt stronger still. She feared it might reel her in if she wasn’t careful.

She made a move to leave before James spoke up.

‘I’m actually glad I had an excuse to come over tonight.’

‘You are?’ She casually cleared her throat to remove the frog that had surreptitiously made itself at home there.

‘I wanted to thank you,’ he said. ‘It has been a long time since I have seen Kane smile like he did today. You see, Kane recently lost his mother.’

At the word recently, her heart squeezed tightly in her chest. She knew from reading James’s blog that it had been more than twelve months since Dinah’s death, but for the guy before her it must feel as raw as the day it happened.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she said.

He shrugged off her platitude. No doubt he’d heard a thousand just the same. ‘You no doubt figured out by Kane’s little outburst that I married his mum when he was around five years old. Thankfully, before Dinah died, we had completed the process of Kane’s adoption or he could have ended up in the clutches of his father.’

So she’d been right. James wasn’t even Kane’s natural father. Oh, help! Siena’s heart squeezed so tight she could no longer remember how to breathe.

‘A drummer,’ James continued as though he had no idea that Siena was fast becoming a juddering mess at his side. ‘On the road a great deal. Bad news. I just thought you ought to know. To understand.’

She suddenly wanted to know everything, but not enough to ask. Her natural born inclination to run was far too strong, far too ingrained, far too well-heeled. And, though James Dillon may be some kind of catch, for that reason alone she could not think of him as casual friendship material.

‘These past months have been tough,’ he continued as though now the floodgates were open he couldn’t stop. ‘And tougher on him, I am sure. But with you, at home, for both of us today was unexpectedly … fun.’

He said the word as though he hadn’t known what it meant until that moment. He didn’t smile. He didn’t even flicker a dimple. But still Siena was moved beyond the capacity she thought possible.

With a deep breath she moved in and placed a hand over his, fighting against the zing that ran up her arm, and said, ‘It was fun for me too. Who would have guessed that a scare like the one I gave the lot of us would lead to that? Sometimes it simply takes a change of scene to show you what you are missing.’

It occurred to her that she had seen a million new scenes since the day she’d left home, yet was she really as fulfilled and satisfied with her life as she could have been? The insidious thought took hold and grew roots and again she cursed herself for ever coming back to this town.

She pulled herself together and moved back to a safe distance, her hand sliding over James’s fingers and on to the cool of the metal window runner and away.

‘Thanks for bringing this back,’ she said, waving her PDA at him as she stepped backwards, further and further away.

‘Thanks for the fun. And for listening.’

‘Consider us even.’

He watched her leave, his face moving further into the shadows as he slid his arm back into the dark car. ‘Goodnight, Siena,’ he said. ‘Goodbye, James.’

She turned and jogged back along the gravel driveway and into the house without looking back, though she heard the soft sound of his car pulling out on to the road behind her.

She made it into the kitchen just in time for Rick to arrive with one chubby sniffling twin in his arms and the other following behind grinning, both in matching blue denim overalls. If he noticed her pink cheeks and extra humidity-induced curls he didn’t say anything.

Siena was all but knocked over by the grinning twin—Leo?—as he bundled up to her, arms raised. ‘Auntie ‘Enna, up!’

She rested a hand on the kid’s head, letting it stay there a moment when she realised how nice the silky soft hair felt between her fingers. Such a cute kid. A cute kid with two loving parents, and as yet no tragedy to temper that cute smile. Nothing yet standing in the way of oodles of future fun.

‘Rick, just promise you won’t ever tell your kids they’re hopeless,’ she said out of the blue, shooting first and asking questions later as she always had.

‘Excuse me?’

‘It might feel like a throwaway line to you, but I promise they won’t ever forget it. And, on that note, I’m going to head up to bed. I have a big day tomorrow.’

Rick looked at her so hard, as though if he let her eye contact swerve, she might fly away.

‘Right,’ he said, drawing his hard eyes from hers to look softly down at his son. ‘I think we could all do with a good night’s sleep.’

Siena slipped her hand away from Leo’s soft head and tucked it in the back of her jeans. ‘Great. I’ll see you in the morning.’

And then she grabbed her PDA and jogged—no, she ran—up the stairs.

It was barely eight o’clock when James shut the door to Kane’s bedroom, but Kane had been out for the count for fifteen minutes already.

He usually had trouble getting him to sleep as he would fret unless James was in sight right up until he could no longer hold his eyelids open by sheer force of willpower. But that night he’d all but dropped off in the middle of dinner.

Was it really as simple as Siena had suggested—that a change of scene was what Kane needed? Had their routine grown from being a coping mechanism into a stale way of life no longer suitable for either of them? Well, truth be told, the only out of the ordinary thing about that day had been the whirlwind that was Siena Capuletti.

James ran a fast hand over his short hair, trying to shake himself awake by way of follicular stimulation. Now Kane was asleep he had to head back to work.

He walked through his moonlit backyard, grabbing an overturned Tonka truck and Kane’s baseball mitt along the way so he could put them away before they were covered in dew.

Once inside his workshop, he pulled the protective sheet off the changing table and stared at it for a full minute. He warmed at the knowledge that Siena had thought his work gorgeous. There weren’t that many people who could pull off a word like that and get away with it, but coming from her lips it held weight.

He shifted the drop cloth back into place. It was almost done. Who had known that when he had begun to work from home that he would have commissions running into the New Year and beyond? Siena had been right there—that change of scene had done his business wonders.

As he dragged up his stool to his work desk, he couldn’t help thinking that Siena Capuletti was something a heck of a lot more than right.

A local but not a local.

Kane had repeatedly called her ‘cool’ as he had run through his crazy afternoon with Matt over dinner. And she was cool—those clothes, those shoes, the way she held herself, her natural playfulness.

A ‘deserter’ the tow-truck driver had called her, which should have been enough to put her a mile from his thoughtsthe very last thing Kane needed in his life was another tearaway.

But when Matt had called her a ‘lovely young flower’ he’d exactly put James’s feelings into words.

She was simply quite unlike anyone he had ever met—with enough latent energy to light a city. When he had touched her wrist, to catch her when she’d tripped—bam! And again when she had laid her small warm hand over his on the window ledge of his car—the energy had resounded from her fine-boned limb into his hand, shooting sparks up his arm until it had kickstarted a deep and all but forgotten pounding in his chest.

That sort of instant attraction was rare—beyond the butterflies a guy couldn’t help but feel when noticing a beautiful woman.

Even with Dinah it hadn’t been like that. For his part there had been more of a slow burn.

One night on the town, his mob of short-back-and-sides friends had wandered into the hard rock Pig’s Head Pub down by the docks wearing their smart casual gear, drinking their pony necked beers, to find a lot of guys saturated in leather and tattoos.

The gang had voted to mosey straight on out of there when they had all seen her—a scrap of a girl with long blonde hair, midriff top, mini-skirt, fishnet tights and heavy black boots, dancing the night away, her eyes closed as though she was shutting out all thought bar the heavy beat of the music.

At the end of the night, James had been sitting alone at the bar, waiting for his mates to come back from the gents, when she had appeared at his side, her blonde hair wild, her skin shiny with sweat, the make-up around her brown bedroom eyes smudged with eyeliner.

‘Dinah,’ she said, holding out a small hand.

‘James,’ he returned, shaking her hand. But, rather than warm, which he would have expected after her night of dancing, she felt cold. So very cold. And her small cold hand made him look twice.

‘I’ve been watching you,’ she said.

James raised an eyebrow in disbelief. With all the attention she’d had that night he would have thought himself way under the radar.

‘Why didn’t you ask me to dance?’ she asked.

James laughed.

‘Finally!’ she said, throwing thin arms into the air. ‘A smile! I was beginning to wonder if you had the ability.’

James’s laughter subsided, but his smile remained. ‘I smile plenty when there is something to smile about.’

‘Fair enough. Anyway, I’m done here and I would really love to head out of here for a cup of coffee. Are you up for it?’

Are you up for me? she had meant and it had taken James half a second to say yes. From that day they were James and Dinah. The nine-to-five cabinet-maker and the wild child who, it turned out, had a child of her own at home. A shy, gentle three-year-old boy James had fallen in love with at first sight.

He had always wondered in the back of his mind if Dinah had sought him out that night because she was looking for someone safe for her son. But he had loved her anyway, perhaps because of the almost desperate way she needed him.

At her insistence they had moved to the suburbs, at his insistence he had adopted her son, and they had become a car-pooling, dinner party holding, regular family.

Until, at the age of thirty, Dinah had been diagnosed with cirrhosis. After six months of unsuccessful treatment and crying herself to sleep at night blaming herself for her wild youth, she was gone.

But, no matter what he had endured in the last couple of years, it seemed he hadn’t been emptied of all aspiration as he had thought. His instincts were whispering just loud enough that he couldn’t shout them down.

Siena. Maybe he ought to … what? Ask her on a date while she was in town? Send her flowers? Write her a card? It had been so long since he had done this he wondered if the rules had changed. Did you call a person these days or was it all about sending provocative text messages on one’s mobile—?

A noise came through the intercom. His ears pricked up. A shuffling of sheets, a small sniffle, then Kane settled again.

Kane. That one word silenced his whispering instincts in one fell swoop. He had been so busy thinking about what he wanted, what he needed, that he had plumb forgotten about Kane.

James again ran hands through his already over-mussed hair, this time in order to rub away the sudden pounding in his head.

Surely he was messing with forces he had no business messing with. Though Siena was like chalk to Dinah’s cheese in many ways, she was young, she lived a four-hour plane flight away and drove in red high heels, for goodness’ sake.

And everyone—counsellors, teachers, friends and books and websites alike—all agreed that what Kane needed was time.

His head swimming, James opened his laptop and found the blank weblog page he was looking for.

The one time he had been in such a bad way as to go to counsellors for himself, they had suggested he keep a diary, as though getting his feelings out of his head and down on paper would make it easier to cope.

As a man of the computer age, he had used the blog format instead. Having his words floating out there in the ether made them feel like more of a release than if they were written on paper and tied up in a ribbon at the bottom of his sock drawer, hidden, as though they were a dirty secret.

He cracked his knuckles, freeing up the wave of information he would have to wade through before he could even think about getting to sleep.

And he began to type.

Showered and changed into her favourite red crushed velvet pyjamas—soft, comfortable, easy to pack and a little bit sexy just in case—Siena leant back against a pile of fat frilly floral cushions on the lumpy spare bed and laid her laptop on her thighs as she shuffled her mouse and set to opening her emails.

Despite the PDA’s beeping insistence that it ought to be, her schedule wasn’t there as yet, which only gave her further heebie-jeebies about what Max had in store for her with his ‘fabulous career move'. What else could no schedule mean but no more flights?

There was one email from Parisian Raoul with a subject title so risqué it made her laugh out loud. But it also made Rick’s accusation echo in her head. A guy in every port … Well, why the heck not? It made her romantic life innocuous and uncomplicated and that was just the way she liked it.

She made a move to open Raoul’s email when noises in the hallway drew Siena’s gaze to her closed bedroom door. Rick must have been putting the kids to bed. She looked to the clock at the side of her bed to find it was some time after eight.

Her fleeting glance slammed to a halt as she saw the white iceberg rose James had given her lying provocatively on the bedside table.

She reached out and took the rose in her hand, the sweet scent tickling at her nose. It only brought about a strange sense memory of diesel fuel, disinfectant and wood shavings. Who knew such a strange mix of scents could be so evocative?

Before she really knew what she was about to do, Siena ignored Raoul’s email and instead typed out a row of letters in the webpage line of her internet browser. She hesitated only a moment before pressing the Enter key.

Within seconds a simple black page loaded on to her screen. And as the word ‘DINAH’ caught her eye she slammed her laptop shut.

What was she doing? Spying on him? Well, of course she was. But what did it matter? Now she had her PDA back—the PDA which he himself had admitted to snooping through!—she was never going to see the guy again. So how could it hurt to read a very little more?

Slowly, slowly she lifted the screen. There were no photographs on the site. No links. No comment boxes. It was simply the emotional outpourings of an anonymous guy. Anonymous to anyone who might stumble upon it, but not to her.

Siena shuffled lower on her bed and picked out sporadic posts. She read about the home video collection James had edited together for Dinah’s funeral which he still let Kane watch in his bedroom on bad nights. She read about odd floating memories of his time with Dinah’s dysfunctional family, her alcoholic mother and deadbeat ex, and she understood a little why he saw himself as Kane’s only hope. He revealed moments when he had felt like giving up, and worse, the moments when he verbally slapped himself for even contemplating it.

A good hour later she dragged herself out of deep tunnel vision when she tasted her own tears on her lips. But she couldn’t bring herself to wipe them away.

In one post from a few months before, James had obviously not even taken the time to edit himself, or to spell check; he had merely poured his feelings out on to the page then hit send, forever capturing his raw emotions.

Saturday, 4:12pm

I went to a memorial today at the Coral Lane Centre for my neighbours husband. Carl passed away two years ago and Dorothy had organised a trip to his favourite pub for his closets friends.

Dorothy and Carl had been togherther for 58 years. Dinah and I’d had just on five.

Dorothy and I have been spending time chatting over the back shrub a couple of times a week since Dinah passed away. We talk of about current affairs, we talk of Kane and how he is coping, nothing deep or specific, skirting around the issue … But it has been helpful all the same.

Even so, I wasn’t sure if I would go to Carl’s memorial, but in the end Dorothy called on me for help. ‘James, dear,'she said. ‘If you could give me a lift there my sister could bring me home.'How could I refuse? Even when I knew she wanted me there more for my sake than hers.

In the end I found that I was not nearly as stressed as I expected t be. I was nhumb. I felt nothing. But why? Why, when I know what Dorothy is going through cuold I not feel more remorse for her? Is it beacuse the well is dry?

Will I never feel anything any deeper than this hum of ever diminishing fuzzy memory ever again?

Siena put the rose back on the bedside table as she reached for a tissue.

Dorothy. She remembered Dorothy. A nice old lady even back when she had been a pre-teen. She’d always had a stash of passionfruit yogurt in the fridge in case Siena came a-calling. Oh, hell, Dorothy and Carl had been the ones to take her in when Rick had had to tend to the details the day her father died.

Feeling emotionally ragged, Siena decided enough was enough. She had a big day ahead of her and the last thing she needed was to wake with puffy red eyes.

She clicked back to the home page to find James had left a post just that evening and she thought, Okay, just one more.

But the minute her gaze landed upon the first words she wished, and not for the first time in her life, that she wasn’t so damned curious.

Thursday, 8:07pm

Today I met a girl.

Those words, and the unequivocal connotation that goes with them, haven’t even entered my subconscious for nigh on six years.

Sure I have met women in that time—dozens, hundreds, even—colleagues, customers, strangers on the street, women working at banks, in shops. Kane’s teachers and his new GP are all women.

But today, for the first time since I met Dinah, since I dated Dinah, since I loved her, and since she was taken from me, I met a girl.

Siena blinked. Once. Twice. A third time. But the words remained.

James Dillon had met a girl.

And, though no names were mentioned, no details given away, she knew it as well as she knew her own name.

That girl was her.